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World Cup Skier Works at Being 17

Mikaela Shiffrin, 17, skis the slalom at a World Cup race in Aspen, Colo., in November.Credit
Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

Mikaela Shiffrin was taking a nap, not an uncommon midday choice for a busy 14-year-old. Except Shiffrin was atop a snowy mountain, sleeping alongside the start gate of the Eastern United States junior ski championships.

“I remember going to look for her,” said Brayton Pech, Shiffrin’s roommate at Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, recounting the three-year-old story. “Mikaela was out like a light, lying on some netting.”

Shiffrin woke up about 20 minutes before her turn in the race, a major competition featuring the best young skiers from nine states.

Shiffrin is now racing on the World Cup level and no longer napping alongside start gates. But this winter, the elite ski racing world has awakened to a startling reality: a 17-year-old who just obtained her driver’s license is already among the best racers in the world.

With two recent victories in European World Cup slalom races — the last win by 1.19 seconds, a victory margin not equaled in slalom in more than a year — Shiffrin leads the worldwide slalom rankings. She is the first American to win two World Cup races before turning 18. Vonn did not win her first World Cup until she was 20.

If Shiffrin maintains her current ranking to win the World Cup slalom season title — not a given, but not improbable — she could, at 18, be one of the gold medal favorites entering next year’s Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

“I absolutely saw this coming,” said Roland Pfeifer, the United States ski team’s women’s technical coach and a former top Austrian coach. “When I first saw Mikaela training two years ago, I told her, ‘If you race like that when you get your chance on the World Cup, no one will beat you.’

“I’ve had 17-year-olds before who were awesomely talented. But they didn’t know how to handle it like Mikaela and they didn’t work at it like Mikaela. I’ve never known any ski racer like her.”

The 5-foot-7, 145-pound Shiffrin, who travels the World Cup circuit with her mother, Eileen, tends to laugh when such remarks are repeated to her. She does not pretend to be something other than a high school senior.

“I’m very grateful and I feel like this is where I belong, but I’m also not getting ahead of myself,” she said in a telephone interview from Austria, where she keeps a winter apartment with her mother. “I have to remember that I am only 17. I feel like a baby sometimes, and I don’t hide that.”

Last winter, when she had her first World Cup podium finish, a third place, she turned to the winner, Marlies Schild, a three-time Olympic medalist, and blurted out: “Oh my gosh, I’m such a big fan. Well, I’m also on the podium with you. But I’m still a big fan.”

After her first World Cup victory, last month in Are, Sweden, fans were calling out to her for autographs. Shiffrin kept turning to look behind her, certain they were making the request to someone else.

Fifteen days later, when she won the prestigious Snow Queen race near Zagreb, Croatia, before a raucous crowd and millions of European television viewers, Shiffrin needed guidance from her fellow competitors on a traditional victory protocol that she, as a teenager, had never performed: spraying the crowd with Champagne after receiving the Snow Queen cape, a significant ceremonial honor in the European ski world.

Photo

Shiffrin became the first American to capture two World Cup races before the age of 18 when she won the Zagreb FIS World Cup Night Slalom at the beginning of the month.Credit
Antonio Bat/European Pressphoto Agency

And then she was 17 again.

“I remember when I was little, I would put towels around my neck and run around my house like it was this cape on my back,” she said in a postrace news conference. “Now I have a real cape thing.”

Raising a Champion

Eileen Shiffrin, who has a ski racing background, sees all sides of her daughter’s life, especially because Eileen is the person who cooks meals between races and acts as a study partner so her daughter can tackle her advanced online high school math and social studies lessons and exams.

“She has a lot on her plate,” Eileen Shiffrin said. “But she really doesn’t fret about it. All the attention, the requests or whatever, it doesn’t affect her much. Usually she’ll just say to me, ‘Hey, Mom, let’s stay in, hang out and watch TV tonight.’ ”

Rika Moore, a longtime ski racing coach in Vail, Colo., where Mikaela was born, said last week that she remembered Eileen Shiffrin coaching on the race training hill when she was pregnant with Mikaela.

“That whole family loves racing,” Moore said, referring to Mikaela’s father, Jeff, an anesthesiologist who raced at Dartmouth; Eileen, a nurse who raced into adulthood; and Mikaela’s 20-year-old brother, Taylor, a freshman on the University of Denver ski team.

“Mikaela was a happy little kid at 7 years old, but from the beginning, she was very determined to ski clean arcs in the snow,” Moore said. “A lot of kids are in the race program to be with their friends or because their parents want them to do it. Not Mikaela. She had her own motivation and she was focused on making perfect turns, one after another.”

When Mikaela was 8, her family moved to New Hampshire, where her father went to work at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. While Mikaela missed the big-mountain experience and expertise of Vail’s renowned youth race program — Vonn trained there as a teenager — the change in locale eventually proved fortunate. For the next three years, with Eileen and Jeff Shiffrin as volunteer coaches, Mikaela skied at New Hampshire’s tiny Storrs Hill, where the coach, Rick Colt, would set slalom courses and guide his prodigy through hundreds of runs.

Making laps on a racecourse set on a small hill with no lift lines or big resort distractions is a time-tested way to build a ski champion. Vonn, for example, learned to ski on a 400-foot Minnesota mountain until she left for Vail at 11. The American Olympic skiing gold medalists Diann Roffe and Barbara Ann Cochran learned on little Eastern hills. Moreover, these skiers based in the East — Shiffrin included — acquired a no-fear mind-set when racing on hard, icy courses common to the region. European World Cup races are contested on the same kind of hard-snow conditions.

Shiffrin was soon fine-tuning an efficient, no-nonsense skiing style with dogged repetition and a reliance on fundamentals. It translated into a quiet upper body and sharp, aggressive ski angles underfoot. Technique was everything to Shiffrin. When her coaches asked her what she did to relax, she would sometimes answer that she watched videotapes of World Cup races to study elite racing tactics. In the kitchen of the family home, Eileen Shiffrin would use broomsticks to simulate slalom gates and have her daughter weave through them trying to learn the intricate rhythm and tempo of hand movements needed to block and push away gates.

Eventually, Shiffrin and her brother began to catch the eye of top Eastern race coaches. When Taylor Shiffrin enrolled at Burke Mountain Academy, a boarding school in northern Vermont specific to ski racing, Mikaela went along, too.

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“She was already a good athlete and a special skier — confident and balanced, with a terrific feel for the snow,” said Kirk Dwyer, the Burke headmaster who became Shiffrin’s personal coach. “But it was her attitude, nurtured by her parents, that stood out the most.”

Dwyer said the Shiffrins wanted their daughter to practice far more than she raced.

“It’s like the Williams sisters in tennis,” Dwyer said. “When they were young, they were practicing when others were competing. For Shiffrin, the basis of her development was lots of time on the snow, and leveraging that time rather than racing.

“If you go to a race, you get two runs down a course that day. If you stay home and practice, you get 12 or 13 runs down the course that day.”

This philosophy led to winters in which Shiffrin would enter only 11 races, a small sum for an accomplished academy racer, but she still won every available junior title. When Shiffrin was 13, her family returned to Vail Valley, where they still reside. But Shiffrin continued to attend Burke, and at 14, she went to Italy for the de facto world championships for 13- and 14-year-olds. She won that race by more than three seconds.

Vonn had been the first American girl to win that title. Now the skiing world had another athlete whom people started calling the next Vonn.

Staying Grounded

By 15, Shiffrin had made her first World Cup start; by 16, her first World Cup podium. Each time, she returned to Vermont to study and train. She is determined to graduate with her Burke class in June.

“When she returns from the World Cup, she talks to all of us about the experience on the first day back,” said Pech, Shiffrin’s roommate. “But when I wake up the next morning, all her stuff in our room is put away and arranged exactly like it was before she left. She goes to class, she trains and she never brings the World Cup up again.

“You can’t pry it out of her. She wants to hear about our lives and our races.”

Thomas Walsh, another junior national-level racer who has been a close friend of Shiffrin’s since they were Vail preschoolers, said he has known since elementary school that his friend would be a top World Cup racer, but not just because she was gifted on skis.

“There is a purity to her dedication that makes you know she is going to succeed,” Walsh said.

Walsh was told he had a type of bone cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma in 2009, just before he was to accept a full scholarship to attend Vermont’s Green Mountain Valley School. He faced multiple operations, months in a hospital, chemotherapy and more than a year of treatments with an uncertain outcome.

“I remember we drove to Denver the day we heard about Thomas’s diagnosis,” Mikaela Shiffrin said last week. “We stayed for a week. Off and on for the next year we would go to Denver for a week at a time to be with him. It was the saddest thing I had ever seen.”

Walsh had some difficult days fighting for his life — when his mother, Kathleen, was asked last week how many operations her son had she said she had lost count — and he was eventually transferred to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston for what was then considered experimental therapy. He would awake sometimes to find Shiffrin at his bedside, and one day as they talked, she told him that she had never been to a high school prom. Burke Mountain Academy did not have one, but the Green Mountain Valley School did.

“Mikaela said to me, ‘You better be around for that because you’re taking me to your prom,’ ” Walsh said.

Walsh made a steady if arduous recovery, enrolled at Green Mountain Valley School and returned to ski racing. Last spring, not long after Shiffrin had been named the rookie of the year on the World Cup, the two childhood friends went to the prom together.

“I’m not much of a dancer,” Shiffrin said. “But it was great to see Thomas so healthy and happy again.”

On the World Cup circuit, such personal stories about a prodigy competing are rare. And Shiffrin is known more for listening than talking. But the veterans have taken notice.

“She is skiing very precise for such a young age,” Schild, a four-time World Cup slalom champion, said before knee surgery in December interrupted her season. “She has done a lot already, and I think she has a great future.”

The American Olympic champion Ted Ligety summed up Shiffrin’s performances in a World Cup diary written for The Denver Post: “She is crazy good.”

Though Shiffrin is concentrating on the technical events of slalom and giant slalom — she has three World Cup top-10 finishes in giant slalom — she wants to one day branch out to the speed events like the super-G and the downhill as well.

“She will be a good speed skier,” said Pfeifer, the United States team coach. “She knows how to glide. But right now, it’s more important that she continue to develop her high level of slalom and giant slalom skiing.”

Shiffrin is friendly with Vonn, who was one of Shiffrin’s childhood idols. Vonn, considered the world’s top female speed skier, said the two got together on the road to paint their nails, joking that it felt odd to be 11 years older than a teammate.

Being “the next Lindsey Vonn” has been a label Shiffrin has lived with since she had braces. But she looks past it.

“It’s flattering, but in the end, I want to have my own success story,” she said. “I’m not in a hurry to win 50 World Cup races like Lindsey has. I have two wins. If I start trying to rush it, it won’t happen. For a long time, I’ve believed that if I focus on the preparation, then the results will come.